Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

England, for Vinnie, is and has always been the imagined and desired country. For a quarter of a century she visited it in her mind, where it had been slowly and lovingly shaped and furnished out of her favorite books, from Beatrix Potter to Anthony Powell. When at last she saw it she felt like the children in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights who discover that they can climb into the picture on their sitting-room wall. The landscape of her interior vision had become life-size and three-dimensional; she could literally walk into the country of her mind. From the first hour England seemed dear and familiar to her; London, especially, was almost an experience of déjà vu. She also felt that she was a nicer person there and that her life was more interesting. These sensations increased rather than diminished with time, and have been repeated as often as Vinnie could afford. Over the past decade she has visited England nearly every year-though usually, alas, for only a few weeks. Tonight she will begin her longest stay yet: an entire six months. Her fantasy is that one day she will be able to live in London permanently, even perhaps become an Englishwoman. A host of difficulties-legal, financial, practical-are involved in this fantasy, and Vinnie has no idea how she could ever solve them all; but she wants it so much that perhaps one day it can be managed.

Many teachers of English, like Vinnie, fall in love with England as well as with her literature. With familiarity, however, their infatuation often declines into indifference or even contempt. If they long for her now, it is as she was in the past-most often, in the period of their own specialization: for the colorful, vital England of Shakespeare’s time, or the lavish elegance and charm of the Edwardian period. With the bitterness of disillusioned lovers, they complain that contemporary Britain is cold, wet, and overpriced; its natives unfriendly; its landscape and even its climate ruined. England is past her prime, they say; she is worn-out and old; and, like most of the old, boring.

Vinnie not only disagrees, she secretly pities those of her friends and colleagues who claim to have rejected England, since it is clear to her that in truth England has rejected them. The chill they complain of is a matter of style. Englishmen and Englishwomen do not open their arms and hearts to every casual passerby, just as English lawns do not flow into the lawns next door. Rather they conceal themselves behind high brick walls and dense prickly hedges, turning their coolest and most formal side to strangers. Only those who have been inside know how warm and cozy it can be there.

Her colleagues’ complaints about the weather and the scenery Vinnie puts down to mere blind pique, issuing as they do from people whose native landscape is devastated by billboards, used-car lots, ice storms, and tornadoes. As for the claim that nothing much ever happens here, this is one of England’s greatest charms for Vinnie, who has just escaped from a nation plagued by sensational and horrible news events, and from a university periodically disrupted by political demonstrations and drunken student brawls. She sinks into her English life as into a large warm bath agitated only by the gentle ripples she herself makes and by the popping of bubbles of foam as some small scandal swells up and breaks, spraying the air with the delightful soapy spume of gossip. In Vinnie’s private England a great deal happens; quite enough for her, at least.

England is also a country in which folklore is an old and honorable study. The three collections of fairytales for children that Vinnie has edited, and her book on children’s literature, have been much better received there than in America, and she is in greater demand as a reviewer. Besides, it now occurs to her, the Atlantic is not widely distributed in Britain; and even if by some remote chance her friends there should see Zimmern’s essay, they won’t be much impressed. English intellectuals, she has noticed, have little respect for American critical opinion.

As Vinnie smiles to herself, recalling remarks made by her London friends about the American press, the cabin crew begins to serve lunch-or perhaps, since it is now seven o’clock in London, it should be considered dinner. Vinnie purchases a miniature bottle of sherry, and accepts a cup of tea. As usual, she refuses the plastic tray upon which have been arranged mounds of some tasteless neutral substance (wet sawdust? farina?) that has been colored and shaped to resemble beef stew, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and lemon pudding. It does not deceive her any longer, though once she assumed that the altitude, or a mild anxiety condition when airborne, was responsible for the taste of airplane food. But the homemade lunches that she now brings with her are just as nice as they would be at sea level.

“Hey, that looks good,” her seatmate exclaims, regarding Vinnie’s chicken sandwich with a longing she has seen before in the eyes of other travelers. “This stuff tastes like silage.”

“Yes, I know.” She gives him a perfunctory smile.

“They must do something funny to it. Radiate it or something.”

“Mm.” Vinnie finishes her sandwich, folds the wax paper up tidily, unwraps a large shiny Mcintosh apple and an extra-bitter-sweet Tobler chocolate bar, and reopens her novel. Her companion returns to his silage, chewing in a slow, discouraged manner. Finally he shoves the tray aside and picks up Little Lord Fauntleroy .

“Guess you’re glad to be getting back to England,” he says presently, as Vinnie accepts a second cup of tea from the steward.

“Mm, yes,” she agrees, without looking up. She finishes the sentence she is reading, stops, and frowns. Has she been talking to herself out loud, as she sometimes does? No; rather, misled by her New England accent and her academic intonation-plus, no doubt, her preference for tea-this western American believes that she is British.

Vinnie smiles. Ignorant as the man is, in a sense he is onto something, like those of her British friends who sometimes remark that she isn’t really much like an American. Vinnie knows that their idea of “an American” is a media convention. Nevertheless, she has often thought that, having been born and raised in what they call “the States,” she is an anomaly; that both psychologically and intellectually she is essentially English. That her seatmate should assume the same thing is pleasing; it will make a nice story for her friends.

But Vinnie also feels uneasy about the misunderstanding. As a teacher and a scholar she finds errors of fact displeasing; her instinct is to correct them as soon as possible. Besides, if she doesn’t correct this particular error, the heavy red-faced man in the aisle seat will realize his mistake when he sees her in the queue labeled “ NON-COMMONWEALTH PASSPORTS.” Or possibly he will think Vinnie is making a mistake, and will loudly try to help her out. No; she must explain to him before they land that she isn’t British.

A bare announcement, however, seems graceless; and having discouraged her seatmate’s attempt to interrupt her reading so often, Vinnie hesitates to interrupt his-particularly since he is now deep into Little Lord Fauntleroy , one of whose minor characters, the outspoken democratic grocer Mr. Hobbs, he somewhat resembles. She sighs and looks out the window, where the air is now darkening above a scarlet horizon line, planning a casual reference to her American citizenship. When I first read that book, when I was a little girl in Connecticut… Then she looks at Mr. Hobbs, willing him to turn and speak; but he does not do so. He reads steadily on, increasing Vinnie’s respect both for him and for Frances Hodgson Burnett, the book’s author

It is not until they are over Ireland, some hours later, that Mr. Hobbs finishes Little Lord Fauntleroy and returns it with thanks, and Vinnie is able to clear up the misunderstanding.